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...who had this (infinitely more accurate/valuable insight) to say about society...
"The child is tricked in the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him - his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted.
We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our rown. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.
Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do - that each one of us is an independent source of action with a mind of its own. The more successfully the community implants this feeling, the more trouble it has in getting the individual to cooperate, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused."
- from The Book, written in 1966(!)
He elaborates much further ("a society which has defined him as separate cannot persuade him to behave as if he really belonged") - but that's the general gist. Funny how his nearly 50-year-old commentary is among the best descriptions of what truly gave rise to the recent riots, along with the deeper issues of alienation/anxiety/resentment. Thatcher, then, should feel proud, considering how successful she was selling that claptrap - because, as Watts pointed out:
"The more successfully the community implants this feeling, the more trouble it has in getting the individual to cooperate, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused."
And permanent confusion leads to leaders like Thatcher, and thus the vicious cycle continues. Ugh, my soul hurts...
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